How the Taliban are erasing Afghanistan’s girls – photograph essay

Earlier this 12 months, I spent 10 weeks travelling with the photographer Kiana Hayeri throughout seven provinces of Afghanistan, chatting with greater than 100 Afghan girls and ladies about how their lives had modified because the Taliban swept again to energy three years in the past.

Hayeri and I each lived in Afghanistan for years, and remained right here after the Taliban took management in August 2021. Up to now few years, we now have seen girls’s rights and freedoms, already severely curtailed, swept away as Taliban edicts have fallen like hammer blows.

In simply over three years, Afghan girls have been banned from almost each side of public life: colleges, universities, most workplaces – even parks and bathhouses. From Kandahar, the birthplace and political headquarters of the Taliban, the group’s leaders have dictated that girls should cowl their faces in public, at all times be accompanied by a person and by no means let their voices be heard in public.

As international girls, we nonetheless carried the uncommon privilege of freedom of motion (though I doubt we might now journey as we did firstly of this 12 months), which has almost disappeared for the 14 million Afghan girls and ladies throughout the nation. Assembly girls whereas guaranteeing their safety was a every day problem.

Every province we travelled to revealed totally different shades of oppression. In some areas – within the south and east specifically – girls had been already dwelling beneath very restricted situations earlier than the Taliban’s official return, with many saying that now, no less than, there was no extra violence. Elsewhere, the sudden lack of freedom has been devastating.

For a lot of, the Taliban’s refusal to permit ladies to attend secondary training has been the toughest blow.

We met Gulsom, 17, who survived a suicide assault on her college only a few months earlier than the Taliban got here again into energy. Severely wounded and left unable to stroll, she should now use a wheelchair and needed to proceed her research at an underground college.

However Gulsom insisted: “My will to check and work arduous has elevated.”

But her youthful sister, who’s 14, appears to have misplaced hope. She has left the home just a few instances in additional than two years.

Gulsom stated: “[In 2021] she went to high school on the day they had been alleged to open, however she returned crying. [The Taliban] fired [shots] to disperse the women, as they had been asking when will the colleges would open. She stated the Taliban beat two ladies and warned them to not go away their properties.”

Since then, she has sunk right into a deep despair. Gulsom stated: “She at all times asks me, ‘What’s the usage of finding out this a lot? On the finish you’ll die. I don’t work arduous, I’ll die; and you’re employed arduous, you’ll die too. I wish to die in peace.’”

We spoke to many women who now not see the worth of making an attempt to proceed their training at house once they can not graduate from college, can not work and can’t think about a future for themselves.

For a number of the younger girls we met, being barred from college now means they should attempt to discover a job or get married, just like the younger girls in a single province who spend their days stitching college uniforms for the younger ladies nonetheless allowed into the first classroom.

We additionally noticed how the financial disaster gripping the nation because the Taliban took energy has proved catastrophic for a lot of women and girls.

At solely 14, Maryam has been pressured to develop into engaged to her landlord’s son in trade for a nicely and photo voltaic panels, after her household couldn’t discover work.

Her household was a part of the wave of returnees expelled from Pakistan in late 2023. As undocumented refugees, they had been harassed into leaving by the Pakistani police. They’re now struggling to rebuild their lives, with few job prospects and nearly no social safety help.

“I went to a madrasa in Pakistan, however right here I can not go,” she advised us. “I’m good at studying and writing. Once I heard that we had been coming again to Afghanistan, we had been very pleased and excited, however I’d quite stay in Pakistan – there I might no less than pursue my training.”

In Zabul and Kabul, we visited hospitals and noticed how malnutrition was one of the crucial corrosive results of the poverty confronted by many Afghan girls and their households.

Fatima is just two and a half years outdated, and weighs 5kg (11lb). Once we met her in a malnutrition ward within the suburbs of Kabul, she had been admitted to hospital for the third time as a result of her household didn’t have the funds for to purchase meals.

Gender inequality is fuelling this disaster: nurses advised us that they had been treating extra feminine kids as a result of when meals is scarce, households prioritised feeding the boys.

It was necessary for us to look past the standard representations of Afghan girls as passive victims of the Taliban and present them as lively gamers in their very own lives.

We wished to indicate their energy within the face of this absurd and brutal regime, together with via acts of resistance: attending underground training networks or creating casual gatherings – whether or not it’s a snowball battle, a party, artwork lessons or henna portray.

These acts, although small, are profound types of resistance in opposition to the Taliban’s efforts to strip away and deny their humanity – maybe the deepest type of violence that’s being inflicted in opposition to tens of millions of girls and ladies throughout the nation.

Many are battling in opposition to a rising tide of despair. Zahra, a younger girls’s rights activist, organised on-line protests after the Taliban started brutally repressing demonstrations: “Since we can not protest within the streets any extra, we do it from house: with the masks, with the hijab, in entrance of the digicam.

“5 to 10 girls do these movies, and we then ship them to the media, with a purpose to nonetheless elevate our voices,” she advised us.

But within the months since we interviewed her in Kabul, she has misplaced hope that her activism might change something and has left the nation to stay in exile. “Now I see there isn’t a method to keep right here; I might waste my time, waste my life,” she says. “There isn’t a enchancment doable. I can’t be a human being right here. There’s nothing.”

After 10 weeks of listening to girls’s tales, we got here away from Afghanistan sure that what is occurring there’s greater than repression: it’s an try and erase girls utterly.

On 18 June, Richard Bennett, the UN particular rapporteur on human rights in Afghanistan, backed calls to codify gender apartheid in Afghanistan as a criminal offense beneath worldwide regulation, defining what was occurring as “a profound rejection of the complete humanity of girls and ladies” primarily based on their gender alone.

Even in these provinces the place extra sympathetic Taliban commanders regarded the opposite manner, permitting underground colleges to proceed and for girls to work and transfer across the streets extra simply, their freedom continues to be dependant on the selections and whims of males in energy.

In Afghanistan, the place girls’s each freedom has been repressed, the place they can not present their faces any longer or make their voices heard in public, it’s extra necessary than ever to hold their voices, guaranteeing they don’t disappear into silence.

In the present day, their hearts are tightened not solely by the burden of repression however by the indifference of a world that appears to have forgotten them. Their tales need to be heard.

All names have been modified to guard identities